Sieges: More Preparation Work

 This is good fun, and a rather different way to spend an evening, but there is still a lot to do to prepare for my solo "practice" siege using Vauban's Wars (VW). After a couple of (short) evenings, I've worked my way through the official start-up checklist from the manual, decided on the forces involved (points-based purchase system), and set up the battlefield (approximately). I still have a lot of stuff to work on - jobs like photocopying and laminating the game turn markers, and making up damage indicators from gravel and PVA glue. Once I have these things in stock, the overheads of putting on a game should be much reduced. I've also laid out my stock of trenches and gun emplacements (mostly from Fat Frank) on a series of canteen trays - it's a bit like a weird tray-bake.

To be going on with, for this evening, here are some photos of the field, and the checklist, including the OOB.

The besieging troops are laid out along the First Parallel. Yes, it does look like a road, but it is a proper trench - since it is out of range of the fortress, and cannot be the objective of a Sortie or a Trench Raid, and since it is assumed to be complete, to get the game off to a flying start, the convention is that it just looks like a road, but if you screw your eyes up a bit it will look fine. There will be plenty of digging coming up, that's for sure. I'm working on a positioning convention for infantry on the walls or covered way - I may need to revisit this, but at present the rule will be that bases touching the parapet are on the firing step, and thus are exposed and may fire. If they are down below then they are in cover and may not fire. OK - I'm on it.

If it's possible, I'd like to add a small table extension behind the fortress section, to include part of the town, including a Rallying Point. I'd also like to add a little Artillery Park for the besiegers, outside the lines (if only to add a little scenic value to what is a very bleak terrain!).

 I've used my old Terrain Warehouse fortress with the supplied glacis pieces, which is pleasing, but does place restrictions on the design of the fort. I may (reluctantly?) opt to use trench pieces to lay out the glacis - most VW users seem to do this, and what it loses in visual brownie points it probably makes up for in flexibility.

I'll knock together another post when I've made sufficient further progress to justify it.

More soon - I think I've got an evening or two of this prep work before any shooting starts!

*************

Trial VW siege - British attacking French in the Peninsula.

 

3-bastion fortress - no mining (ground too wet or something)

 

Initial set-up, as per VW manual   * = "hidden"

 

Checklist Item	Attribute	Besiegers (British)	Garrison (French)
1	Season	Spring
2	Powder Supply (D6 + 6)	8*	11*
3	Supply Dice	D6	D4
4	Food Supply	-	17* (Average)
5	"Popular Support" [low is good]	-	D8* (fairly hostile)
6	Security	D8	D8
7	Strength of Fortress	Assumed "Poorly Maintained"	Walls 6*. Ravelins 5*, Bastions & Gates 7*. Earth Walls 2
8	Location o f Magazine & Sally Port	To be determined when layout is done	Keep hidden
9	Mining/Countermining	No (too wet)
10/11	Forces	[36 points] Genl & CinC               Free 3 Siege guns              Free 1 Spy                           Free 4 Sappers                    8pts 3 extra Siege Guns    12 2 Heavy Mortars        2 2 Lt Shrapnel Mtrs     1 2 Medium Guns           4 6 Infantry                      6 1 Grenadier                  2 1 extra Spy?                  1 Total exp                     36pts	[18 points] Genl & CinC         Free 3 Fortress guns  Free 1 Spy                      Free 2 Sappers             4pts 2 Heavy guns       6 1 Light Gun           1 4 Infantry              4 1 Grenadier           2 1 extra Spy?           1 Total exp            18pts
12	Leadership Dice (LD)	D10 [Average]	D12 [Average]
13	Siege Morale Pts (SMP) (decided not to use "Army Specials" for this game, to keep things simple)	23 units => 26SMP	13 units => 14SMP

 

Sieges: Getting Organised (a Bit...)

 For a while I've been intending to take advantage of the strange world of Covid limitations and do some solo work on getting the hang of Vauban's Wars. Siege games are, by definition, very dependant on all sorts of fancy scenery and hardware, and it is always very easy to find assorted reasons why this is not the ideal time to have a go. Well, that's long enough.

I now plan to have a solo bash at a Napoleonic siege game, so I'm scratching around trying to collect all the bits and pieces I need. Some of this is trivial work, to be honest, it's just a question of getting down to it.

Today I have a case in point. The starting set-up for my proposed training game requires the British to have a couple of heavy mortars. Now I have odd bits of artillery around the place, and I have some spare soldiers, so it was a simple matter to put together the required mortar battery from some old Hinton Hunt gunners and a couple of very scruffy Hinchliffe mortars I got as a make-weight in an eBay parcel. Here they are - not beautiful, but absolutely fine - cross them off the to-do list. Ready for duty.

There is a new approach evident here - previously I put a lot of effort into making up smart siege trains for the French and the British in the Peninsula. I now also have pieces for a proposed Spanish train, including some fortress guns, and I'm starting to collect items for WSS sieges. My new approach is that I shall paint the ordnance pieces in nondescript colours wherever possible, and make up crews of various nations who can "borrow" spare kit as needed. This is the first such - the scabrous mortars here are simply BluTacked onto the bases, so they can be loaned out to another army, in a different period if required, or they can even be replaced by more beautiful examples if the dreaded Creeping Elegance ever catches up with my siege projects.

Anyway, enough said. I retouched and based these chaps (ex Eric Knowles gunners, by the way) while listening to the Crystal Palace vs Liverpool game on the radio. Easy peasy. The British now have siege cannons, mortars (both heavy and Coehorn), various howitzers and sappers. I even have some new, specially sized and based units of foot, rescued from spares boxes for duty on sieges. And still the wonder grew.

I'll put some notes here on the starting set-up for my Vauban's Wars solo game in a day or two.

A Little WSS Painting, and Some Light Reading Matter on Peninsular Sieges...

 Even by my standards, this is probably going to be a fairly shambolic post as far as structure goes. If you're up for it, here goes.

First off, I have finally painted up the dismounted contingent of my first unit of Imperial dragoons for the WSS - nothing remarkable, in any sense, but they have been hanging around, unpainted, getting on my nerves, for some months. The figures are 20mm Irregular castings. The unit is the Aufseß Dragoons, who were not Austrian, but from the Frankischer Kreis. The mounted chaps came from the Eric Knowles hoard, so my task was merely to paint the dismounted element to look fairly similar to Eric's brushwork. OK - good - all based and magnetised and in the official Very Useful Boxes.

Otherwise, I have mostly been continuing my work on preparing for some serious testing and rehearsing of some siege games. The big recent change, of course, has been the eventual publication of Eric Burgess's Vauban's Wars. All very good - I am on my third read-through and I have copious notes, getting ready to go. At this point it gets just a little complicated...

The obvious starting point would be some actual Vauban-style warfare, for which my new WSS armies would be ideal, except that, as yet, I do not have any proper siege artillery for them (though, of course, I soon shall). They could borrow some ECW units to help out, I guess, but that would be a disappointingly shabby compromise for a first effort. Therefore, by default, I shall start off with some Peninsular War actions, for which I have more than enough troops - even the specialists.

In preparation for this magnificent stage in my wargaming development, I have been collecting bits of fortresses, and mortars, and engineers, and all sorts, for ages, and have spent years reading about the sieges in the Peninsular War. The immediate issue arising here is that most of what I have read has been a collection of heavily British narratives about Ciudad Rodrigo (though only the successful Anglo-Portuguese siege, of course), and Badajoz (same qualifier), and Burgos, and San Sebastian - plus snippets about the Salamanca forts and so on.

Nothing wrong with any of this, of course, but two points come straight out of the woodwork:

(1) There were a great many sieges in the Guerra de la Independencia, of which only a few involved the British army. Having read more widely, and given a free choice, I would dearly love to follow the adventures of Marshal Suchet, conquering all those exotic Spanish-held towns in the North East - Tarragona, Tortosa, all that. There were the French assaults on Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, as well, not to mention Sarragossa and some real biggies. OK - that's all excellent - plenty of variety.

(2) Spain and Portugal were relatively poor countries, and never had the resources (or priority) to carry out major programmes of modernisation of their fortresses. If you are looking for something like a modern, Vauban-approved style of fort, then there were very few - Almeida is one passable example. The range of defensive architecture involved was remarkable - which, again, is good for the student and the gamer because of the variety and because of the exotic places involved. Astorga was basically a Roman fortress in 1809, and there were medieval and Moorish-style castles all over the place, with greater or lesser degrees of improvement. 

Here you go - Vauban himself might have recognised Almeida as a viable fortress, though not when the magazines blew up...

Ciudad Rodrigo, as an example, had been modernised (a bit) in 1776 - the old, high, masonry walls were masked by the placement of fausse-braies in front of them - which served to give some protection from siege guns in the plains surrounding the town, but did not achieve the same amount of security from guns placed up on the Teson heights. Gradual patching-up of old fortresses to cope with the increasing power and potential of modern cannon was always going to be difficult, and these botched-together forts were not wonderful - that is why the style of the sieges tended to be "quick and dirty" - Vauban would have been surprised at the rushed timescales and the relative lack of science.

One other thing to think about is that the fausse-braie add-ons were usually made of earth. That's pretty crude, on the face of it, but the great thing about earthworks is that you can fire cannonballs at them all day without knocking them down, so additional tricks of the trade were developed - if you really wanted a hole in the enemy's earth banks, explosive howitzer shells were a necessary part of the assault. If you wanted to dig parallels in the dead of night, you had to use big parties of infantry to get the work done.

That's enough of this sketchy walk-through, I think. I've been doing a lot of reading (I seem to have acquired quite a lot of books over the years), and have enjoyed it thoroughly. One thing for sure is that it would be a bad idea for me to put a huge effort into tweaking Eric Burgess's excellent game right at the outset to cope with the local weirdnesses of the Peninsula, and thus I plan to move onto some proper Vauban-type gaming as early as possible. On the other hand, I have been very interested in the Peninsular War's sieges for a long time, and I am delighted to gain a little more understanding of how they worked.

Many of my English-language books consist extensively of quotes from each other. The most valuable original source (if you are happy to read French) is JV Belmas' Journaux des Siéges Faits ou Soutenus par les Français dans la Péninsule, de 1807 à 1814, published in 4 volumes in 1836. This is (or recently was) available as a set of pdf files from Google Books; if you are really interested and can't find a downloadable copy, get in touch and I may be able to provide some extra information. There are copious tables of equipment, ammunition consumed, losses, materials captured, OOBs and so on. Sadly there are no maps, though Lipscombe's atlas can provide some useful back-up.

Sieges: Back to the Little Stuff

Suitably inspired by all the work being done in my garden, I took the opportunity this afternoon to return my attention to the toys - to clean up and sort out some of my siege bits and pieces, and make more sense of the way they are stored. 

As I'm learning (and I'm quite happy about it - the amount of kit is a large part of the spectacle and the enjoyment), tabletop sieges use a lot of scenic pieces. I already had a good collection of walls and defences and buildings - medieval and Vauban-period - and I now have a growing mass of earthworks, gun emplacements and so on, to support serious sieges. I really do need to get this lot stored in a logical and practical way. So work is under way!

 

Here's something strange spread across the attic floor - there are 4 trays of hand-made trench sections (which can also double as earth walls placed in front of pre-gunpowder stone defences) and gun emplacements, all supplied by the excellent Fat Frank, then, at the front, a tray of assorted cast-resin pieces, various makers (I note that a few of these still need painting, by the way).

In the left foreground, open, is a badly thought-out view of a brown wooden cigar box containing 4" x 1" brown felt strips - these are for use as forward saps in my Vauban's Wars games (and, of course, any other games which might wish to borrow them). My starting idea is that you get two of these strips as a single piece of Sapper Activity action, when cued by the appropriate Sequence Card. You may lay them as you wish. Obviously, the speed of forward sapping will be closely related to how obliquely you place the strips - in the house parlance, to the angle of zig-zag. If your sap is enfiladed from the defences, you have done it wrong. There are no excuses. The closer you get to the fortress, the more extreme will be the zig-zag profile of the sap, and thus the slower the rate of approach.

There is another box (closed) at about 3 o'clock in the picture - again, not a great visual - in there is my collection of assorted multiple and single gabions - some of which also need some paint, now I look at them.

I propose to put the Fat Frank pieces in a box of their own, since this will be the main supply for the building of parallels and batteries by the busy besiegers. The rest can be stored separately as a back-up supply.

Near the top of the picture are a couple of very old Bellona gun positions, which are really just present for old-times' sake.

[In the real world, my driveway is now ready for the gravel, and one of the two trees nominated for removal has been severely wrecked - about two-thirds of the bulk has gone, though the main "frame" of trunk and big branches is to be removed tomorrow, along with, I hope, most of the second tree. Good progress - we've been very lucky with the weather.]

Stirrings from the Attic

 I've been working away quietly in my semi-isolated state - done a fair amount of painting, refurbing and sorting-out. Here are a few quick pictures, from recent tasks which actually produced something.

I finally completed a unit of Spanish granaderos provinciales which I started (according to my notes) in March 2017 - which is not especially slow by my own standards! Figures are mostly OOP Falcata.

I replaced the crews for two French foot artillery batteries, using retouched ex-Eric Knowles Hinton Hunts - I used my original guns, which are Hinchliffe 20mm. The previous gunners were (whisper it) overscale Prinz August home-casts, very poorly painted, which resulted in these batteries being confined to the French Artillery boxfiles for many years (I'm beginning to understand how they must have felt) - now they can get out and shoot at someone.

David Crook, who saw these little chaps on my table via a Zoom visit, became quite emotional at the thought of these old soldiers getting back into action after so many years, in a form which we hope Eric would have approved of!

For my WSS collection, Goya very kindly painted some more Imperial troops - these are the two battalions of the Regiment of the Markgraf of Baden-Baden, in official shiny WSS varnish.

And I've also been working away steadily on bits and pieces for future siege games (I now have taken delivery of the Vauban's Wars rules and the posh playing cards, and am studying for my diploma). Here you see one of my handicraft evenings, cutting various length strips of 1-inch wide brown felt, to serve as forward saps in the game...

...and here is the start of a small set of mini-units for siege infantry - in this case the Peninsular War department. There is no strict requirement to re-base anything for the VW games,  but I have taken a liking to these little 12-man units, mounted in 3s on skinny little bases, which can sit comfortably in trenches and on walls and covered ways. This may seem a bit extravagant, but it gives me a really useful job for some Lamming figures that don't really have a home, and other various spares from the Deep Boxes. In particular, a good number of marching figures and "standing firing" fusiliers, which normally I don't use, can get a gig at sieges.

I'm not doing anything fancy with these - just a quick touch-up if needed, some fresh varnish and stick them on the skinny bases. Initial target is about a dozen such units for each side - normal units from my standard collection will be fine for tactical events like storms and sallies, if numbers are short!

I'm also adding to my collection of trench sections and gun emplacements, and some odd-shaped earthworks pieces to serve as a fausse braie for the medieval walls of places like Ciudad Rodrigo (Vauban never got as far as Spain, as far as I can see - the proper Vauban kit will come in very nicely for the WSS...).

Once again, I've bought in scenery pieces from that fine chap Fat Frank, still going strong in his eBay shop. You can get your trenches made to order, with or without sandbags!

I'm sure there will be more pictures soon - in the meantime, I hope you are well, and keeping safe.

Sieges - Vauban Makeover

I'm very excited about the imminent publication of Eric Burgess's Vauban's Wars rules, which should be appearing very shortly. It's appropriate that I should make some effort to prepare for this momentous event by getting on with some smartening-up work that's been in the queue since the end of last year. That's what I was doing yesterday.

Last night - just the final dry-brushing with my house "dust" colour to go, and then some heavy-duty matt varnish.

I've now arranged that the Vauban-period walls should be a similar colour to the medieval walls I have, so that I can build hybrid fortresses as necessary (I had already taken this step with the 3-D printed pieces I obtained recently), I've repainted the glacis sections so that they match the house baseboard colour and I've smartened things up generally. One of the shades of brown paint which had been used by the Terrain Warehouse people on the walls (10 years ago? More?) had reacted badly to one of my previous attempts to varnish them, and had become a strange, mottled grey-brown, so I fixed that, and cleaned up the rest of the paintwork where required.

They are now sitting while the varnish cures, then they can go back in their boxes.

Finished; today, waiting for the varnish to cure a bit before packing away.

Sieges: The Doofer and the Scale Paradox

It would be fatuous - probably even very irritating - to come up with some kind of useful personal spin-off from the current corona-virus situation, but it is a fact that, since quite a lot of things that I had planned to do are not going to be possible, then I am going to be forced to do something else instead. In the interests of preserving the tiny, ragged edges of what is left of my sanity I have an enforced opportunity to revisit things which have been shelved or passed over, and there will be any amount of time (if, of course, I am spared) to think about stuff.

Therefore it cannot be a complete coincidence that today's post returns to what used to be a tradition on this blog a few years ago - I shall begin with a lengthy digression. I, at least, will probably enjoy it, and it serves a useful secondary purpose in filtering out any unfortunate readers who arrived here by accident, and who are beginning to see what a huge mistake that was.

I always assumed that "a doofer" was just a saying used in my own family. My grandmother (the one from Preston) used the phrase to refer to any object whose real name she had forgotten, or simply didn't know. There was also a faint edge of intolerance in there - in my grandmother's world, which mostly was built around Dickens, Mozart, cats and Rich Tea biscuits, anything which had overtones of technology was an overhead - the sort of thing that some (common) technical person would know about. Thus, though the thing itself might be useful, the idea of actually understanding it was well beneath contempt. She had a doofer with which she lit the gas stove, and doofers which secured the stair carpet. Her life was filled with them.

Stove-lighting Doofer

Stair-carpet Doofers

Her brother, Alf, worked for many years in the tram (later bus) workshops at Edge Lane, Liverpool, and he also spoke of doofers. Originally, I believe, the term may come from the army - possibly WW1 - to describe something which was improvised, or fixed, or botched, and which would "do for now". [I checked my etymological dictionary, since that is the sort of thing for which I now have more time, and I see that the likely origins of doofer are pretty much as I thought, though the date is felt to be 1930s. That would surprise me if it were true, since Great Uncle Alf would never have adopted any phrase which appeared as late as the 1930s. Yes, this was a digression within a digression - we have nested digressions].

Gradually this evolved into a general term for something whose proper name you didn't know, and I am surprised at how widespread this became. It is bound to be out of fashion now, of course, but I recall that as my grandmother became older and more dotty there were more and more doofers around the place. In more recent years, my mother started calling almost everything "the thing-io"; it is a great comfort to be able to forget the real names of everyday objects - I can see this.

What were we talking about, again?

Oh yes - doofers. Well, you will be excited to read that I have taken delivery of a new doofer - it arrived on Saturday. I have been waiting for this doofer for nearly two years, and to be more accurate it is a prototype doofer.

Some time ago I commissioned the manufacture of some rather similar doofers for my medieval/ECW sieges. They worked well - they were, to be specific about it, firing platforms which could be stood behind fortress walls, to give standing room for guns or bodies of musketeers. I got my friend Michael at SLD to design and laser-cut them from MDF, enhanced a little with masonry-style engraving, and I made them up and painted and matt-varnished them, and they were good. They were doofers to help with problems arising from the eternal Scale Paradox in tabletop wargames (which, for reasons which I shall attempt to explain, reach their zenith in the arcane world of miniature sieges). At the time, I was also very surprised at the amount of criticism they generated.

Doofer to facilitate sieges on Medieval Walls - shades of "2001: Space Odyssey"?

And in action - a bit crude, but effective

The problem is, you see, that if you had attended a real medieval or Renaissance siege with your digital camera handy, you would not have seen any of my doofers in action. They are not part of the model-railway-style facsimile of a real siege, and quite a few readers reacted badly to this. I called them "gun platforms" or sometimes "buttresses", but really they were just add-on doofers to solve a problem arising from the Scale Paradox.

Before I get buried even further in this effort, let me insert a spoiler here, to explain that the new doofer I have received is a prototype of the same sort of device, but designed to work with Vauban-period walls. After adding the first-generation doofers to my ECW sieges, I realised that progress with my 18th-19th Century sieges would require the Mark II Siege Doofer. The walkways behind the parapets on my model Vauban walls are only 30mm wide, which is not nearly enough to mount a gun up there, without some form of extra support. I shall, I promise, come back to this after I have burbled on about the Scale Paradox for a bit. If you are still with me, you have my heartfelt admiration and gratitude.

My games usually take place on a hex-gridded table, which I have found helps greatly and keeps things simple. There is still an implied groundscale - my hexes are 7 inches across the flats, which is near enough 180mm. My default horizontal scale is (approx) 1mm = 1 yard/metre. This obviously varies for big battles scaled down, but that default is (approx) 200 paces = 1 hex, which is a useful round number.

I use 20mm or 1/72 scale soldiers, and for infantry and cavalry I use an age-old ratio of 3 figures = 100 men, so that my battalions normally have about 2 dozen men. The basing is designed to give frontages compatible with the 1/1000 groundscale, and it also tries to make the spacing of the miniature soldiers look about right for the kind of troops and the kind of warfare they represent. [Though please try to remember, Claude, that this is not the same as visual "realism" - a 24-man battalion is not at all realistic, however much the photos out of Charles Grant and Don Featherstone have come to shape our understanding].

Just to be awkward - another personal compromise - I have yet another scale on the go at the same time. My buildings are usually 15mm scale, which is about 1/100 - this is similar to the old TT model railway scale. The underscale buildings have a few advantages - they are cheaper, they have a smaller footprint, and they can be grouped into what seem to me to be more convincing villages. You can also, with time, get used to the look of the thing - the fact that a soldier would get stuck in the door of the church is a relatively unimportant matter when you are fighting Leipzig. I work on the assumption that a smallish village is marked by a representative cluster of slightly undersized houses - they are usually placed around the edges of a hex, so that a unit may be placed among them, and the houses themselves can be shunted about as necessary to make room for what is going on - the individual model buildings do not represent real individual buildings, and you can't take roofs off or put people inside. In the games I play, that is not necessary or useful. The important things about a village are its outline (and in a hex-based game that is an obvious concept, though non-hex players will still have a requirement to define the edges of the built-up area) and who is in it.

Anyway, you get the idea. On occasions I may choose to use 20mm-scale walls and hedges for my soldiers to stand behind, just for the look of the thing, but by and large this odd mish-mash of scales is now tried and tested and works well. Let's remind ourselves, that's

* 1/1000 horizontal scale, for ranges, moves, frontages, table layout.

* 1/72 (visual) vertical scale for the model soldiers - which is a given.

* 1/100  vertical scale for the buildings - which is simply a convenient compromise.

Now then. When we consider sieges this suddenly becomes more of a problem. The layout of a fort is not just a matter of appearance or convention - the lengths of the walls, the positioning and dimensions of the bastions and so on are set by rules which relate to the effective range of a musket (or whatever), and a representative model is no longer going to be fit for purpose unless it has about the right footprint. We now bump our noses quite firmly against the "look of the thing" problem - we can use 15mm buildings if we wish, but the big issue here is the Scale Paradox - our toy soldiers live in a world where a man is about 22mm tall, but the distances and the ground plan require a world where 1mm is 1 metre (or 2mm = 1 toise, if you insist). There - did you feel that bump on your nose? That's because the groundscale is one tenth of the visual scale. It always was, but it just became a problem.

For reasons which I really don't understand - I can only assume that the model designers had been through all this same reasoning before - the old Terrain Warehouse 15mm Vauban pieces that I use look OK with the soldiers, but the footprint of the various bits also makes sense in the groundscale I use. So it works in both senses (though obviously this must be a pretty silly-looking fort from the point of view of proportions, but it is silly in the same way as the soldiers themselves, so maybe that's what matters).

I've now reminded myself (again) that I don't really understand why this works, but it does. Further, it may not actually work at all - it might just be that I think it does. There you go - full circle - you set your games up to suit you, and I'll suit myself. That's probably where we came in. Before I finally put this note out of its misery, here's some photos of the new doofer. Since I am pleased that it is what I designed, that it works and is what I wanted, I shall get Michael to make me some more, and I'll make them up and store them away in the Sieges boxes. 

The new prototype Mk II Siege Doofer - assembled, painted and varnished

In position on the Terrain Warehouse 15mm scale Vauban wall

And here demonstrating how some big French guns may be deployed

Vauban Fort - maybe back on again?

This topic has been on and off like the girls' costumes in an old Windmill Theatre revue. Last update was about two years ago - here. 

As discussed before, I am the proud owner of approximately one half of a Vauban fort - it is nominally in 15mm scale (vertically), but the (horizontal) ground scale seems to be about right with my game scale of one-7-inch-hex-equals-200-paces, so you can work out what that might be if you can be bothered. Whatever it is, it looks very presentable and works nicely for my siege games (such as they are). The fort was made and painted by the old Terrain Warehouse operation (henceforth TW) - this fort, by the way, was once described by Henry Hyde as "the Rolls Royce" of fortress kit in this scale, so you have no need merely to accept my word that it is nicely done.

I have had some adventures over recent years, trying to get more parts for it. TW no longer exist, and the rights and moulds for the fortress were sold to another firm; I had a faltering dialogue with them two years ago, and the suggestion was that it might go back into production some time - not definite - but there was a good chance that they could make up some extra pieces for me.

Then, as so often happens, the line went dead. I have recently been thinking about doing some scratch building to augment the fort - the original production did not extend to gates, and there were a few other obvious bits missing, so scratch building had always been somewhere on the agenda.

Well, I am now back in contact with the current owners - it seems they about to set up a new company to concentrate on MDF and resin buildings, and the fort is a high priority.

We've been here before, of course, but that seems like potentially good news - I am asked to keep in touch - when something more definite develops I'll mention it here.

My original dealings with TW included me sending them some sketches of other pieces they could add to the range - so the garrison could get in and out. The aerial photo shows the original TW kit, the action picture (from 2009 or so) includes additional buildings to make up a fortified town.

Anyway - no news really, but the Windmill girls are once again in a "back on" situation.